Douglas Preston - Thunderhead

Black, strangely quiet, simply looked at Sloane and nodded. This time, with the mental security of the harness and Sloane’s encouragement, he got the hang of using the jumar and was soon moving confidently up the cliff. Sloane followed, then Holroyd reached hold of the lowest rung.

Nora had noticed that, in the sudden scramble, Sloane hadn’t bothered to check on the image specialist’s state of mind. “You up to this, Peter?” she asked.

Holroyd looked at her and smiled bashfully. “Hey, it’s just a ladder, like she said. Anyway, I’m going to have to climb this thing once a day. I’d better get used to it.”

He took a deep breath, then began to climb. Nora followed carefully. She tested one or two of Sloane’s placements and found them to be as tight and secure as the woman had said. She’d learned from experience it was best not to look down on a long climb, and she kept her eyes on the three figures ranged up the face above her. There were long minutes of almost vertical climbing. They caught their breaths at each ledge. The final pitch ended with a brief, frightening moment of hanging backward as she worked around the protruding rimrock. For an instant, Nora was reminded of the Devil’s Backbone: the scrabbling at the slickrock, the frightened screaming of the horses as they hurtled to their deaths below her feet. Then she took another determined step upward, hoisted herself onto the top of the cliff, and collapsed, gasping, to her knees. Nearby sat Holroyd, sides heaving, head resting on crossed arms. Beside him was Black, trembling with exhaustion and stress.

Sloane, alone, seemed unaffected by the climb. She began moving the small array of equipment a safe distance from the edge of the cliff: Holroyd’s satellite positioning unit, now sporting a long UHF whip antenna; the microwave horn; the solar panel and deep-cycle battery; rack-mounted receivers and transmitters. Beside them, winking in the morning light, the satellite dish was still enmeshed in nylon netting from the trip up the cliff face. Nearby was the weather-receiving unit.

Holroyd struggled to his feet and moved toward the equipment, followed reluctantly by Black. “Let me get this stuff set up and calibrated,” Holroyd said. “It shouldn’t take long.”

Nora glanced at her watch with satisfaction. It was quarter to eleven, fifteen minutes before the appointed hour for their daily transmission to the Institute. As Holroyd initialized the radio unit and aligned the dish, Nora looked around at the surrounding vista. It was breathtaking: a landscape of red, yellow, and sepia clifftops, unfolding for countless miles under brilliant sunlight, covered with sparse piñon-juniper scrub. Far to the southwest, she could make out the sinuous gorge through which ran the Colorado River. To the east stood the brooding rim of the Devil’s Backbone, running off and behind the Kaiparowits Plateau. The purple prow of the Kaiparowits thrust above the land, like a great stone battleship ploughing through the wilderness, its flanks stripped to the bone by erosion, riven by steep canyons and ravines. The landscape ran on endlessly in all directions, an uninhabited wilderness of stone covering many thousands of square miles.

To improve reception, Holroyd climbed into one of the stunted juniper trees nearby and screwed the twenty-four-hour weather receiver into the highest part of the trunk. He then wrapped the unit’s wire antenna around a long branch. As he adjusted the receiver’s gain, Nora could hear the monotonous voice of the forecaster reading out the day’s report for Page, Arizona.

Black, having watched Holroyd set up the equipment, was now standing well away from the rim, looking pleased with himself, the smugness somewhat diluted by the harness that still clung to his haunches. Sloane, meanwhile, stood perilously close to the edge. “It’s amazing, Nora,” she called out. “But looking down from here, you’d never know there was an alcove, let alone a ruin. It’s uncanny.”

Nora joined her at the edge. The ruin, set far back, was no longer visible, and the brow of rock below their summit shut out any hint that a cave lay underneath. Seven hundred feet below, the valley lay nestled between walls of stone like a green gem in a red setting. The stream ran down the center of the valley, and Nora could see more clearly the tortuous boulder-strewn path of the frequent floodwaters, a hundred yards wide, that ripped through the center of the valley. She could see the camp, blue and yellow tents scattered among the cottonwoods well above the floodplain, and a wisp of smoke curling up from Bonarotti’s fire. It was a good, safe camp.

As eleven o’clock neared, Holroyd shut off the weather receiver and returned to the radio unit. Nora heard a bark of static, the whistle of frequency overload. “Got it,” Holroyd said, tugging on a pair of headphones. “Let’s see who’s out there.” He began murmuring into the microphone, almost toylike in its diminutive size. Then he straightened up abruptly. “You won’t believe it, but I’ve got Dr. Goddard himself,” he said. “Let me patch this through to the speaker.”

Abruptly, Sloane moved away from the edge and busied herself coiling rope. Nora watched her a moment, then turned her glance to the microphone, feeling the excitement of the discovery kindling once again inside her. She wondered how the elder Goddard would react to the news of their success.

“Dr. Kelly?” came the distant voice, crackling and small. “Nora? Is that you?”

“Dr. Goddard,” said Nora. “We’re here. We made it.”

“Thank God.” There was another crackle of static. “I’ve been here at eleven every morning. Another day, and we would have sent out a rescue party.”

“The canyon walls were too high, we couldn’t transmit en route. And it took us a few more days than we anticipated.”

“That’s just what I told Blakewood.” There was a brief silence. “What’s the news?” Goddard’s excitement and apprehension was palpable even through the wash of static.

Nora paused. She hadn’t quite prepared herself for what to say. “We found the city, Dr. Goddard.”

There was a sound that might have been a gasp or an electronic artifact. “You found Quivira? Is that what I just heard?”

Nora paused, wondering just where to begin. “Yes. It’s a large city, six hundred rooms at least.”

“Damn this static. I didn’t catch that. How many rooms?”

“Six hundred.”

There was a faint sound of wheezing or coughing, Nora couldn’t tell which. “Good lord. What kind of condition is the ruin?”

“It’s in beautiful condition.”

“Is it intact? Unlooted?”

“Yes. Nothing’s been touched.”

“Wonderful, wonderful.”

Nora’s excitement grew stronger. “Dr. Goddard, that’s not the most important thing.”

“Yes?”

“The city is unlike any other. It’s absolutely filled with priceless, priceless artifacts. The Quivirans took nothing with them. There are hundreds of rooms filled with extraordinary artifacts, most of them perfectly preserved.”

The voice took on a new tone. “What do you mean, extraordinary artifacts? Pots?”

“That and much more. The city was amazingly wealthy, unlike any other Anasazi site. Textiles, carvings, turquoise jewelry, painted buffalo hides, stone idols, fetishes, prayer sticks, palettes. There are even some very early Kachina Cult masks. All in a remarkable state of preservation.”

Nora fell silent. She could hear another brief cough. “Nora, what can I say? To hear all this . . . Is my daughter there?”

“Yes.” Nora handed the microphone to Sloane.

“Sloane?” came the voice from Santa Fe.

“Yes, Father.”

“Is all this really true?”

“Yes, Father, it is, and it’s no exaggeration. It’s the greatest archaeological discovery since Simpson found Chaco Canyon.”